1. Field
The invention relates generally to the field of footwear. Specifically, the invention concerns footwear designed to meet certain operational and environmental situations commonly occurring in military, outdoor, recreation, and related settings.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known that soldiers, various military personnel, law enforcement professionals, hunters, fishermen, hikers, climbers, and various other outdoor enthusiasts encounter various environments during the course of outings, exercises, trainings, and field operations.
Typical environments and operational situations include: sharp objects capable of piercing through footwear and on into a foot; complex obstacles that need to be negotiated; rope, ladder, and other ascent and descent situations, fast roping, repelling, bouldering, climbing, free-falling, diving, assaults, clandestine approaches, and the like. Such activities may also include the need to negotiate damp terrain, rivers, swamps, and other bodies of water where swimming is required.
Existing footwear often tend to slip during the act of climbing because of thick rubber outsoles that limit agility due to their thickness. Additionally, existing rubber surface outsoles are not concave and/or designed for climbing. The existing footwear in the art suffer from slippages, heavy mass (particularly when wet). Use of such footwear may result in increased climbing time. These shortcomings result in the need for significant supplementation of leg-driven climbing techniques through various compensatory efforts, including arm and hand efforts, often causing upper body fatigue. Additionally, existing footwear often do not properly fit into commonly encountered footholds during climbing. For example, existing footwear are too large to fit into the rungs commonly encountered on ladders and other fixtures associated with military ships. These deficiencies may force soldiers to partially, or in some cases even, totally abandon the use of the feet and legs for climbing locomotion. Furthermore, existing footwear provide no design features which address the frictional forces encountered during, for example, rope ascents and descents. Accordingly, users routinely suffer frictional burns and resultant blistering due to the forces encountered during such ascents and descents. Additionally, it is common for military personnel, law enforcement personnel, and outdoor enthusiasts to engage in rappelling and other rope maneuvers where frictional forces created by the contact ropes, and similar surfaces, with footwear lead to damage to the footwear and user.
Existing footwear are comprised of a thick rubber, or similar material, outsole designed to provide protection for the foot from the breach of the outsole. However, existing outsoles commonly fail to protect the foot from sharp objects found in various settings. Many objects encountered are capable of cutting through even the thickest of rubber outsoles and, accordingly, existing footwear often fail to protect a user's foot from penetration injuries. Also, existing footwear may retain liquid in the uppers for long periods of time resulting in blistering of the foot, unwanted noise production, and the accumulations of unwanted weight.
Additionally, existing footwear do not properly fit into swimming fins that are used in multiple aquatic applications and environments. Also, existing footwear do not provide a mechanism to ensure the coupling of a swimming fin to an article of footwear in a footwear-in-swimming fin application. Thus, existing footwear often dislodge from swimming fins, resulting in lost swimming fins and impaired swimming locomotion. Existing footwear also do not provide design features that address the need for military personnel, hunters, fisherman, archers, etc. to have footwear that produces very little sound upon locomotion.
Certain military personnel often require footwear that can function while a wearer is engaging in “hooking and climbing,” and often require footwear suited to moving safely throughout the exteriors and interiors of a ship or related vessel. Wearers thus need footwear that allows proper entry and exit from climbing rungs, as well as footwear with a climbing arch and other features. For operations and exercises that require diving and swimming, soldiers need footwear that can fit into swim fins. Combination footwear able to meet the above needs would provide a wearer with the ability to execute a number of varied operations and exercises without the need to change or remove footwear. For example, a multi-functional footwear is needed that could allow a wearer to exit an aircraft into water, swim toward a target, and move over land to a target or operational theater, all without having to remove the footwear.
Common military footwear has undergone little change over the last 30 years. Therefore, standard issue footwear has not been designed to meet the specific environmental and operational situations mentioned above. Additionally, fatigue is a major operational hazard encountered during military, and related, operations, and currently used footwear invariably consists of materials and design features that create an unnecessarily heavy unit of footwear, directly adding to the fatigue of a user. Many of the military-related environmental situations and challenges that are mentioned above also relate to situations encountered during various civilian outdoor pursuits. For example, footwear that could be used both in and out of water would be useful for hunters, fishermen, kayakers, rafters, hikers, and other outdoorsmen. Footwear that could be used for walking, while being sufficiently streamlined to fit into a swim fin, would be especially useful for float tube fishermen. Footwear that could dry quickly after being used in wet environments such as those encountered in rafting, kayaking, fishing, and hunting are also needed. Footwear that could obviate the need for two (or more) separate types of footwear in a given outing would be advantageous. Footwear that could lessen the noise produced during locomotion would be advantageous, as would footwear that could decrease the oscillation generated with locomotion would be advantageous to hunters, shooters, archers, paint ball enthusiasts, and the like.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for new version of footwear that overcomes deficiencies of current footwear, including, but not limited to, deficiencies found in conventional footwear intended for exercise, training, mechanical, combat and security driving, direct action missions, hostage rescue, law enforcement, air and land-based assaults, insertions, desertions, urban warfare, mountain warfare, land navigation, combat jumping, high altitude low opening, and high altitude high opening combat and training, over-the-beach missions, breaching, close-quarters combat, hunting, fishing, climbing, hiking, repelling, rafting, kayaking, archery, paint ball games, other outdoor pursuits, and various other military and civilian uses.